

Specifically, a rotational ambigram reads the same when viewed upside down, while a mirror or bilateral ambigram is one that reads the same backward and forward. What words are Ambigrams?Īn ambigram is a word or design that retains meaning when viewed from a different direction or perspective. French novelist George Perec wrote a 5,556 word palindrome called “Le Grand Palindrome”. James Joyce coined the longest palindromic English word in his book Ulysses. The common ambigram examples include family-forever, life-death, love-hate, hope-faith, sinner-saint and so on. What are tattoos called that say two things?Īn ambigram is a form of typographical art that allows one word to be read in more than one direction, where the word reads the same when upside down or turn over to form an entirely new word.

Read the article to see 11 examples of unusually clever or cryptic ambigrams.

(The design blog Brand New, in comparing this logo to its predecessor, declared the redesign "exa-llent.")Īmbigrams are "the hottest trend in typography since Helvetica," Wired magazine said in its April 2009 puzzle issue. The logo depicted here, for the Latin American radio network EXA FM, is an inversion ambigram: it reads identically when rotated 180 degrees. From the Latin/Greek roots ambi- ("both") and -gram ("written or drawn").Īmbigram types include inversions, mirror images, chains (linked to infinite repetitions of the word), and symbiotgrams (composed of two words, one viewed from one vantage point and the other from a second). Ambigram: A typographical design that can be read from at least two viewpoints.
